Screen resolution streching, how to..?

[Kazumba]

(Sorry it this is the worng place to post this....)

Hi all,
I want to make an adventure game, but...

I don't seem to understand this "resolution" thing. I want to make a full screen game. I started with 320*200, and my screen res is 1024*768.
I created my first "sprite" (a welcome 'splash' screen for my game) it was 550*250, so it streched too wide (i guess i should've known this would happen...) so I changed it to 320*200 and now it's squizzed, but messy, and takes up the whole screen size. I read that 320*200 is what lucas arts used on games like Sam'N'Max - so i guessed that's more then enough for me... is that right?

Basicly maybe I'm just asking: At what resolution should I do my images, and if I should use 320*200, how would I make "sprites" smaller then the whole screen? and if the answer is just to make them smaller, how would I know how they would look like in full screen?

If I'm asking the wrong qusestions, please excuse me... I'm kinda new...

I'd appreciate anyhelp... Thanks in advance!

[Khris]

Resolution in games is a matter of personal taste. Early LucasArts games indeed used 320x200. The res simply sets the amount of pixels displayed on your screen horizontally/vertically.
You'll notice that by decreasing your Win res to, say, 640x480, everything gets bigger and you can see less on the desktop (e.g. big webpages get cut off and need to be scrolled). That's because the amount of pixels used by e.g. an icon on your desktop doesn't change, while the size of one pixel does change, resulting in the icon being displayed bigger on the monitor.

If you want the game to be fullscreen, you can still use any resolution you want, as long as the game is set to fullscreen in AGS's winsetup.exe.
I'd recommend starting off with 320x200 (or 320x240) as low-res drawing is generally considered easier.

If you want to draw rooms/screens that are fully visible at 320x200, start with a blank picture thats 320x200. After you've painted the doorways, characters should be about 90% as tall as them (about 50-100 pixels).

I guess you're using paint, though, so don't use the built-in stretch tool as it might distort the pic. My version (WinME) doesn't support entering image dimensions, but it's possible to resize the drawing area to the desired dimensions by dragging it's lower right corner (little blue square). You can check the current size at the right half of the statusline.
Of course, do this *before* drawing anything, otherwise the picture will get cropped/a blank border.

To check how your work would look at fullscreen, just stretch it to 320% both horizontally and vertically, then simply undo.

I'd recommend using another gfx prog, though. Both paintNET and TheGIMP are freeware, just google for them.

[Kazumba]

I guess that's just what i needed.... Thanks again!

[Layabout]

320x200 is not a square resolution, AGS allows you to use 320x200 with widescreen, which is recommended if you want to use 320x240. Otherwise, in a proper fullscreen resolution, the pixels will be streched vertically, which looks naff nowadays. Current resolutions use square pixels, oldschool dos resolutions were silly.

So i'd recommend for a low res game, use 320x240 or 320x200 with widescreen. And use a background as a title screen, not a sprite.

[Gilbert]

Actually 320x200 was not silly, right, the problem was that it did not have a 1:1 aspect ratio, but there were reasons to design it like that. Since 320x200x8bit just fits into a 64kb data segment, this made memory managements and programming, etc. much easier (at least at that time).